2001 NACTMUS Conference
Byron Bay: June 30- July 2, 2001
Creating Musical Futures:
Challenges to Music Education in the 21st Century
Abstracts of papers
Byron Bay: June 30- July 2, 2001
Creating Musical Futures:
Challenges to Music Education in the 21st Century
The sound bite culture and the future of music training
by Michael Hannan
This paper expands upon some of the ideas from two papers of mine that have been published in Music Forum, one titled The Training of Contemporary Popular Musicians (in Vol 7 no 1) and the other The Future of Tertiary Music Training in Australia (in Vol 7 no 3). It also draws extensively on research I am doing for a book on music careers and job categories which is being funded by the Music Council of Australia.
In the first of these papers I discussed the idea of music training as a practical option for a generic tertiary education and then some of the problems associated with the idea of training popular musicians.
The generic skills gained by performance, composition and production students include work discipline, interpersonal communication, negotiation, entrepreneurship, personal presentation, teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, problem solving, project management, time management, and crisis management, to name but a few. These are all skills that are highly valued by employers generally, not just employers in the music industry.
The issues I identified in the training of contemporary popular musicians broadly include (1) the possibility that students may lose their edge when isolated from the street-wise culture of popular genres and learning under the influence of an older generation of musicians, (2) the development of general curricula that are not tailored for the various genres and specialised professional activities in the industry; and (3) the economic difficulties of funding and implementing the training properly. This latter issue is also the focus of my other Music Forum paper which advocates a more cooperative model for training musicians rather than the territorial and competitive one that seems to have evolved in this country.
My more recent research into the broad range of careers in music has been focused for each occupation on the duties of the job, the skills required to do it well, the business or employment prospects and the training opportunities. I have drawn extensively on the literature of work practices of musicians as well as interviews or written surveys conducted with leading practitioners for each job category.
Some of the themes that seem to be emerging in my research include:
In the field of recording engineering, for example, most commercial studios employ people as an assistant engineer doing menial work like sweeping the floor and cleaning the double-glazed windows for a trial period before any actual recording duties are assigned. The qualifications (and skills) a prospective audio engineer might already have are irrelevant. The apprenticeship must be undertaken regardless. The same is true for sound editors working in film post-production. Generally in this field apprentices are taken in at school leaving age. On the job training is thus the norm.
In arts administration I found the same trend. Almost every professional arts administrator I consulted suggested that the main way into arts administration was by doing volunteer work to prove that one has the skills for and commitment to the field. The idea of doing a degree or postgraduate diploma in arts administration and then expecting to get a job without some actual on-the-job experience was not a normal career entry strategy. In fact the reverse was the case. The post-graduate diploma in arts administration offered in most capital cities was seen as a qualification to be gained once in a job in order to enhance the prospects for advancement in the sector.
Of course with music performance the piece of paper does not mean anything: Getting work is based on how well a person can play and whether they have the specific skills required for each type of job. Some of the skills that might be required are sightreading, memorisation, dancing, acting, doubling on another instrument, doubling instrument and voice.
For example a graduate of the Southern Cross University performance program recently told be about an audition he did for a cruise ship job as an electric bass player. He was required to be able to play in a variety of popular styles and jazz styles, and to sightread well. The feadback when notified that he was unsuccessful was that they didn't like his feel for walking bass lines (his sightreading and instrumental technique were fine, they assured him).
Another example: I regularly see job advertisements for theme park entertainers which ask for singers who dance well, instrumentalists who can also sing well, and singers who can act in character (for tribute style acts).
The extent to which all these skills are covered adequately by training programs is not known to me, but I suspect from my own experience that it difficult enough to train musicians to play well, and there is a tendency to downplay aspects of music performance such as acting and dancing, perhaps thinking that these skills, if required, can be gained without concentrated and disciplined formal training. And indeed when I have tried to introduce these ancilliary skills into the music program at Southern Cross there has been a degree of resistance from both staff and students.
I believe the reason for this is that that our music training cultures tend to be focused on music and not on performance. This applies to the classical music training as well. Obviously classical musicians don't have to dance (although it wouldn't surprise me, given the pervasive dumbing down and gimackey marketing of this field, that this might be expected in the future). Audiences expect all types of music to be played with great energy, and for the performers to connect with them. The most successful classical performers seem to have these abilities in abundance. In the case of popular music, virtually all genres involve high energy and movement on stage in combination with the ability to connect and communicate with the audience in a more intimate or entertaining way. Whether these skills (and they are skills) are learnt in a training context or by watching others do them, it still requires a disciplined or self disciplined approach to acquire them. For a guitarist to be able to mock head-bang in time with the music requires a lot of practice- it just doesn't happen by itself. In the more popular genres it's just as likely that a successful performer will come from an acting or dance training background, as from a musical one. If these aspects of performance are not given the large amount of attention they deserve, I believe that as music performance trainers we have our heads in the sand.
The same issues exist for the training of composers. You only have to listen to the radio or television or go to clubs or restaurants to realise that a huge percentage of the world's professional or commercially released music is now primarily electronic. It follows that the primary training for composers should be in electronic means of music production. Whereas in the pre-MIDI era it was impossible to be a versatile professional composer without being able to notate music in a highly skilled way, it is now not necessary to have that skill at all for most of what is being written for the music and media market. There are exceptions of course such as contemporary classical commissions and film scores that specify live orchestral ensembles, but since most music for record production, advertising, television and small budget films seems to be electronic, it is possible to establish a career as a composer without notation skills as long as the music sounds competent and is well produced.
In the modern era of big-budget film making, the role of the screen composer is sadly giving way to the role of the music supervisor whose job is to negotiate the licensing of existing current or past popular music recordings as a substitute for specially composed underscore. The successful pop stars of the day are now the new breed of film composer with the advantage that their work is being cross-marketed with the film, and they are usually not required to write and record anything new.
The requirement for a professional composer to be able to write to a brief is still fundamental, but the brief is likely to involve the latest styles of electronic popular music genres, or electronic versions of previous acoustic genres using advanced sampling and synthesis technologies.
The best sample libraries are now as authentic sounding as real instruments, but since producers are always looking for new sounds, there is also a significant professional opportunity for composers to create new sounds and even sample libraries. This represents another specific area of composition and audio training that should be targeted.
The idea of creating sample collections leads to opportunities for composers to move into sound design for both traditional media and interactive multimedia. Individual sound effects for film are now made like compositions using multitrack hard disk recording and editing systems. Because of the advent of powerful computer audio workstations, elaborate recording studios are no longer required for sound effects work to be assembled. As a result it is common for sound effects artists to work in isolation on only a small part or aspect of a film such as doing all the door-slamming sounds. The requirements of surround sound and large screens have however transformed this art into a hyper-real one. According to my film-post informant, Phil Winters, a simple door closing may take 8 or 9 unusual sound elements just to get that door to appear to close realistically (for example wooshing sounds, the dropping of a sandbag at the end to give it a proper impact, and three or four different rattles on the impact. On a small television screen it is acceptable to use just an authentic recording of a door closing, but with a 20-metre screen and surround sound other embellishments are needed. With this large-scale format the mixing of sound effects to film is ideally done in the theatre. thus posing problems for training organisation which may wish to teach this kind of practice but can't afford a room large enough for a 20 metre screen.
In the new media, composition is in many senses radically different to writing for the linear media such as television and film. For computer games, for example there are multiple potential narrative pathways, and the task of organising the music to achieve structural coherence through all the possibilities presents a significant new challenge. In addition the complete range of functions of film music is not available. According to Björn Lynne 'in the movies the music suggests what is going to happen, not what has already happened. In computer or video games, when the bad guy appears around the corner and starts shooting at you, it's really too late to say anything about it musically.' Another distinguishing feature of these new media is the relatively short sound files and reduced sound quality available. In general to achieve higher sound quality and longer sequences of music, the level of interactivity has to be sacrificed. In other words there is a significant limitation placed on the creativity of the composer when compared to composition for film and television. In addition many of the methods of implementing the soundtracks of interactive multimedia products involve computer programming. A thorough grounding in games technology is required to negotiate the broad field. The different technical requirement of the various gaming platforms must be understood, including RAM availability, sampling rates, looping capabilities and file formats. The advantages and limitations of music systems used in games, for example DirectMusic, tracker, audio streaming, general MIDI, redbook CD audio, need to be understood.
In other words the game has changed with computer games and similar interactive multimedia opportunities for composers and sound designers. Training programs, if they are any good, need to address these issues. It is clear that a broader base of technological training is required for this kind of work, even broader than that provided by those training institutions that have embraced music technology.
I have used the term soundbite in the title of my paper because it seems to me that it symbolises the focus of compositional practices and music consumption in the postmodern era. According to the web-based reference engine, xrefer, "a soundbite is a segment of speech, especially one made by a politician, specifically designed to be extracted for news reports and media coverage" (eg former US prsident George Bush's phrase "Read my lips: no new taxes"). The concept of the soundbite, symptomatic of the dumbing-down agenda of television, has resonances in what is happening to music. The soundbite is a feature of music used in interactive multimedia like games and websites. This is necessitated by the nature of the medium: the non-linear movement from one level of the game or website to another, the restricted memory available to run sound files, and in the case of web-based products, the limitations of data flow.
In addition certain styles of popular music, particularly electronic dance music, incorporate sampled soundbites usually from old movies or cult television series. In popular music recordings, the killer sound, the melodic fragment or the loop sampled from a cult record as well as the composed song hook all function like soundbites. The opening bars of the oft-repeated classics of both pop and classical music are effectively soundbites
[Play example: first four notes of Première Gymnopédie (Track 1)]
In my careers research dealing with children's music groups like the Wiggles, I have learnt that the songwriting techniques used are based around the idea of imitating the feel and contour of nursery rhymes without actually copying them: another version of the soundbite: the sound-bite sound-alike.
Just what am I getting at here? Simply that all these different forms of music and sound design have different technical requirements, and thus different training approaches are required. The culture of music composition has changed radically and the training methods really need to follow suit.
How is this possible within the confines of a single composition syllabus?
In my Vol 7 no 3 Music Forum paper I suggested a cooperative approach amongst different tertiary training providers, particularly for areas of study that are suitable for online delivery. For example for the general area of composition there are many approaches. In my careers book research I have made a very broad classification of genres of composition and still managed to find 19 categories not including related creative occupations such as arranging, orchestrating, remixing, programming and producing.
Chapter 2- Composition
No one training provider would be in a position to teach all of these in a concentrated way, or even a fair selection of them, and each type of composition has specialist technical and technique requirements. To be realistic some of these 19 categories of composer might be better split into subcategories (eg different genres of songwriting, different genres of contemporary classical composer, different genres of electronica composition).
My cooperative idea is that a consortium of tertiary training providers could share the development of a suite of online training units, each contributing a selection of units relevant to the expertise of their own institution. This way the students in each institution would not be restricted by the human and physical resource limitations of that institution.
In addition I believe that it is essential to maintain an open and supportive learning environment for all kinds of music and a broad base of learning resources (books, journals, CDs, music videos, software, workstations and studios of various kind) that will enable students to develop their own potential and direction in music.